A federal grand jury in Washington declined to indict six Democratic members of Congress who published a video last November urging service members to refuse unlawful orders. The US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, led by Trump appointee Jeanine Pirro, had sought the charges — and came up empty.
The six lawmakers — Senators Mark Kelly of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, along with Representatives Jason Crow of Colorado, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania — all have backgrounds in the military or intelligence community. Their November 2025 video was brief and direct:
"Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders."
That single sentence detonated a political firestorm. And now, months later, the legal machinery marshaled against them has stalled at the grand jury stage, as the Daily Mail reported.
The Uniform Code of Military Justice already establishes that service members must obey lawful orders — and may refuse illegal ones. The six Democrats weren't announcing a novel legal theory. They were restating existing law on camera.
But context matters. The video landed in November 2025, and its timing carried an unmistakable political charge. It wasn't a civics lesson — it was a message aimed at the commander-in-chief. The Democrats knew exactly what they were doing, and the reaction was immediate.
President Trump responded on social media, calling the video:
"SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!"
Followed by:
"HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!"
Capitol Police moved to provide 24/7 security for the lawmakers. Senator Slotkin described the shift in mid-November:
"Capitol Police came to us and said, 'We're gonna put you on 24/7 security.' We've got law enforcement out in front of my house. I mean, it changes things immediately."
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth pursued his own track against Senator Kelly — a 25-year Navy combat pilot and former astronaut — seeking to strip his military rank and pay. That process remains ongoing.
The DOJ probe moved forward despite the lawmakers announcing they would not cooperate with it. The federal attorneys assigned to the case were reportedly political appointees rather than career DOJ prosecutors, according to an anonymous source cited by NBC News.
That detail matters. Grand juries are famously sympathetic to prosecutors. The old line about indicting a ham sandwich exists for a reason. When a grand jury declines to indict, it signals something beyond reasonable disagreement — it suggests the case presented to them was not persuasive on its most basic terms.
The Speech or Debate Clause in Article I of the Constitution provides lawmakers with broad protections for remarks relating to the "legislative sphere." Whether this specific video falls within that sphere is a legitimate legal question. But a grand jury didn't need to reach the constitutional argument — they apparently weren't convinced the case cleared even the preliminary threshold.
This is the core problem. If the administration believed these lawmakers committed a prosecutable offense, the case needed to be airtight. Instead, they handed Democrats exactly the narrative they wanted.
The six lawmakers wasted no time framing the outcome. Senator Kelly released a statement Tuesday evening:
"It wasn't enough for Pete Hegseth to censure me and threaten to demote me, now it appears they tried to have me charged with a crime — all because of something I said that they didn't like. That's not the way things work in America. Donald Trump wants every American to be too scared to speak out against him. The most patriotic thing any of us can do is not back down."
Senator Slotkin posted on X:
"But today wasn't just an embarrassing day for the Administration. It was another sad day for our country. Because whether or not Pirro succeeded is not the point. It's that President Trump continues to weaponize our justice system against his perceived enemies. It's the kind of thing you see in a foreign country, not in the United States we know and love."
Representative Crow was characteristically blunt:
"If these f***ers think that they're going to intimidate us and threaten and bully me in the silence, and they're going to go after political opponents and get us to back down, they have another thing coming. The tide is turning."
Representative Houlahan called it:
"It's a vindication for the Constitution."
None of these statements is surprising. What's notable is how cleanly they land. When you pursue a case and lose, your opponents get to write the story.
Here's where conservatives should be honest with themselves. The "seditious six" — as some on the right dubbed them — published a video that was politically provocative and deliberately timed to undermine confidence in the chain of command. There are legitimate reasons to find it objectionable. Encouraging service members to second-guess orders, even under the banner of existing law, carries implications that extend well beyond a civics refresher.
But objectionable speech and criminal conduct are not the same thing. The gap between the two is where American liberty lives. Conservatives spent the better part of a decade arguing — correctly — that the Obama and Biden DOJ had been weaponized against political opponents. The IRS targeting of Tea Party groups. The FISA abuse during the Russia investigation. The unequal application of the law during the summer of 2020. Those arguments carried weight because they were grounded in evidence of institutional overreach.
A failed indictment of sitting members of Congress — pursued by political appointees, rejected by a grand jury — hands the left the mirror image of every argument conservatives have made about prosecutorial abuse. It doesn't matter whether the two situations are truly equivalent. Politics runs on narrative, and this narrative writes itself.
The six Democrats are now more prominent than they were before the video. They have a persecution story. They have quotable defiance. They have a grand jury that functionally sided with them. Every strategic objective the prosecution might have served has been inverted.
Conservatives have stronger tools than failed indictments. The Speech or Debate Clause exists precisely to keep political speech disputes out of criminal courts and inside the political arena — where voters, not prosecutors, render judgment. The proper venue for accountability was always the next election, the committee hearing, or the public argument.
When the left overreached with its prosecutions, the result was a backlash that helped fuel a political realignment. Overreach doesn't become acceptable because the other side does it first. It becomes a gift to your opponents.
The administration has real power and a real mandate. Spending that capital on a case that a grand jury won't even return diminishes both.
